NEH Summer Institute​

Julie Crawford is Mark van Doren Professor of Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She has published widely on authors ranging from Shakespeare and Sidney to Clifford and Wroth, and on topics ranging from the history of reading to the history of sexuality. She is the author of a book about cheap print and the English reformation entitled Marvelous Protestantism (Johns Hopkins UP, 2005), and Mediatrix: Women, Politics and Literary Production in Early Modern England (Oxford UP, 2014). She is currently serving as an editor for The Oxford Handbook on Margaret Cavendish, The Norton Anthology of English Literature (The Seventeenth Century), and a special issue of ELR on Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson. Her current book project is entitled “Margaret Cavendish’s Political Career.” 

Mario DiGangi, Professor of English at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, is the author of The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge, 1997), Sexual Types: Embodiment, Agency, and Dramatic Character from Shakespeare to Shirley (Pennsylvania,  2011), and The Winter’s Tale: Language and Writing (Arden, 2022). He has edited Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer’s Night Dream (Barnes & Noble) and The Winter’s Tale (Bedford Shakespeare: Text and Contexts). In 2016 he served as President of the Shakespeare Association of America. He is currently working on a project exploring sexuality and race in Shakespeare.

Maria Fahey is a member of the faculty at Friends Seminary, where she has taught English to middle and high-school students for more than thirty years.  She is the author of Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama: Unchaste Signification, which was shortlisted for the 2012 Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award.  Dr. Fahey has written a series of student guides to reading Shakespeare’s plays.  It has been her privilege to work with other teachers, most recently at the Taktse School in Sikkim, India.

Krista Apple is an Assistant Professor of Acting at University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA, where she teaches Acting, Voice and Speech, and Shakespeare/Verse Drama. She is also a professional actor and acting coach, and a member of the Actors’ Equity Association and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA). She is a member of the resident acting company at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, where she has performed in numerous contemporary and classical productions, including some of her favorite Shakespeare plays – HAMLET (Gertrude), ROMEO & JULIET (Nurse), and MACBETH (Witch/Lady MacDuff). She is also a certified Reiki practitioner, a running enthusiast, and a proud mom. You can learn more at www.kristaapple.com.

Claudia Zelevansky has over 20 years of experience as a director, producer, educator, and consultant and holds a Bachelor of Science from Northwestern University in Performance Studies and a Master of Fine Arts in Directing from the Yale School of Drama.

Claudia was the Associate Artistic Director of the Dallas Theater Center until 2004. She has taught acting and directing at Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College, Northwestern University, CUNY’s Queens College, Bard College, CalArts, and at Oberlin College, mentoring hundreds of students. Directing work includes more than 35 productions in NYC and across the country, including post at Manhattan Theatre Club, The Flea, The Public Theater, the Alliance Theatre (Atlanta), and Dallas Theater Center. Claudia made her directorial film debut with The Cold Snap, which had its premiere at the Los Angeles International Film Festival in 2010.

After attending Columbia University’s Arts Administration program, Claudia became Senior Associate at Martin Vinik Planning for the Arts, a planning firm that specializes in capital projects, curriculum design, and strategic planning for the arts. At MVPA, Claudia worked with a wide range of domestic and international museums, theatres, schools, and arts districts to improve planning, programming, and overall solvency.

Since 2020, she has been the Executive Director of the Mercury Store in Brooklyn, NY, an organization devoted to developing the work of theatre directors, devisers, and choreographers.

Project Director Lindsay Tanner is the Director of Education at Theatre for a New Audience. Her commitment to arts programming that advances a just, equitable, and liberatory education system is informed by her experience as a program leader, teacher, teaching artist, and theatre practitioner. Before joining TFANA, Lindsay served as Senior Program Manager for Urban Arts Partnership’s Everyday Arts for Special Education program, a federally-funded research project investigating arts-based professional development for teachers of students with disabilities; completed graduate work with Sesame Workshop and VSA Massachusetts (now Open Door Arts); directed the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s Shakespeare Summer Camp; co-founded the Accidental Shakespeare Company; and served as the founding Head of Expressive Arts at Academics West. Lindsay has facilitated workshops for educators and artists nationally and internationally on embodied inquiry, applied theatre, and collaborative artmaking for social change. Lindsay holds an M.Ed. in Arts in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a B.F.A. in Theatre, with a double-major in Anthropology, from NYU. She currently serves on the board of Emit Theatre and the steering committee of the Arts for All Abilities Consortium.